A Singular Presence On The Web--Striking.ly

Making The Best Web 2.0 Applications for Education in 2012 list by Larry Ferlazzo, educator and blogger at Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... and receiving a recommendation on Twitter by Heather Moorefield-Lang, Education Librarian at Virginia Tech and former and new chair of the American Association of School Librarians Best Websites for Teaching and Learning, plus favorable reviews in notable tech news, Striking.ly is a web 2.0 application designed to create

gorgeous, mobile-optimized sites in minutes. 

It features ease of use with one screen for all your work and a simple click for editing.  Other options are:

• search engine optimized so your site can be easily found
• your page can be quickly connected to social media
• page analytics and
• comment form and email form to your page.

To register for this free service enter in your email address, a password and your first name. Click on the green GET STARTED. IT'S FREE! green button.  You are then taken to a new screen, your Striking.ly dashboard.

On the left-hand side of your dashboard,  the column allows you to view your sites, go to your account (edit profile, change email/password, view invoices, change plan and close account, upgrade ($8.00 and $16.00 per month plans), rewards (ways to go Pro for a week by promoting Striking.ly in social media) and logout.  In the center are three categories from which to chose your template for your site; Your Business or Project, Your Personal Site and Your Portfolio.  In the far right lower corner is a small question mark where you can access help in the form of browsing articles, browse ideas and sending a message or feedback.  

The first category on the left contains five templates, the next, three and the final one, four.  For educational (classroom), professional purposes, the personal site or the portfolio site templates appear to have the most potential.  But for personal use, creating a presence quickly, they would both work well.  The personal site templates could be used to create a biographical page for a person from history.  To keep track of or showcase books read during a specific time period, I can see using one of the portfolio templates.

To experiment with the application I decided to use one of the portfolio templates for some of my favorite picture books (potential Mock Caldecott candidates) read to date.  When you mouse over a template the design name is shown, you can immediately begin to edit or see an example.  Upon clicking edit, you are taken to your work space.

On the left is your toolbar. At the top you have the choices of save, publish, exit or settings. You have the option to preview your site on the screen, tablet or phone.  Beneath this you can alter section by section; renaming them or deciding to hide them from the web site header on the upper right.  A new section can be added to the template along with a link to a blog or other links.  Every item in the template, when moused over, can be edited. 

When I moused over and clicked on the Echo Rocket logo and clicked Edit, my options were to upload, effects, remove, add link and add description.  Upon selecting Upload, a new screen appeared with eleven places from which to obtain images.  The Effects tab yielded a similar array of choices for altering the selected image.  At this point I am beginning to be amazed at the sharp-looking single web page which can be created using this application.  I added a link and a description to the image I choose.

When you mouse over and click edit for any of the text portions, you can make it bold, italics or underlined, add or remove a link, use two types of bulleted text and justify your margins four different ways.  You can choose to have heading or text font size.  Continue editing the template until you have the site you desire.  Make sure to save and preview before you publish.

Clicking the Publish button gives you a chance to share on Facebook or Twitter, and copy the URL link.  You can always change the last portion of the link to make it more personal.  When finished here click exit to go back to your dashboard.


Striking.ly has enough options within the templates to personalize a single page site.  The design and layout of all the templates within the three categories are clean and sophisticated.  Once you have the elements you wish to add to your chosen template, the page can be created quickly with ease.  I highly recommend this new web 2.0 application.

Here is a screen capture of a portion of my page after editing the Echo Rocket template shown above.

Here is a link to my created web page for Mock Caldecott 2014.  By clicking on the images they can be enlarged and scrolled through as if in a slide show.

Follow this link to my review of Tackk which lists links to all the other web page creation tools I have reviewed.